Ramanan S. recently asked on Google+: “So what exactly do people do to track what the hell is going on in their game? What stuff do you have on hand when running a game?﻿”

I replied the usual stuff. Stage fright never goes away. Keep notes on a Campaign Wiki.

And I mentioned how prep using fronts has been creeping into my game.

So here’s the evolution of how things had been going, on a campaign level. First, I had a passive world, waiting for the players to mess with it. My motto was and still is: “The harder you look, the more there is to see.”¹ Then I started using An Echo Resounding and thought that the domain game would provide for the kind of slow movements in the world around them. As it turned out, the domain game didn’t get my players excited. It felt a bit like accounting and it was too much effort to simply introduce some random setting changes. I then turned to using a random table to introduce setting changes. But we kept forgetting to roll on the table. There was simply no incentive. So finally I have arrived at Fronts.

Fronts are easy to write up. Here’s what I have been using:

a catchy name (”Slaad Invasion”)

a short phrase to describe it, a subtitle (”The Manifestation of a Slaad Lord”)

a number of events with escalating effect (”war in the land of the fire giants”, “war of the god men against Asgard”, ...) – a list of things that I can look down on when there’s a lull and improvise some calamity, an encounter, a news item, whatever; “announcing future badness”

a question or two regarding a player character; this will help me twist and turn the dagger so that it’ll end up pointing in their direction; it also reminds me to have daggers pointing at every single one of them (”Will Logard fight this anarchy?”, “Who will help the dwarves?”)

“We’re playing in a sandbox. Dangers are not adapted to the strength of the party. Generally speaking it’s safer near civilized settlements. The further you move into the wilderness, the more dangerous it is. That’s how players control the risks they want to take.

You learn of rumors from travelers in taverns, merchants at markets, sailors at harbors, books in libraries or sages in their ivory towers. This information is not always accurate or complete. Use these rumors to add new locations, goals and quests to your map. The actions of your characters determines the direction the campaign will take. There is no planned ending for the campaign. As long as you keep investigating rumors, exploring locations and following quests, I will keep developing the game world in that direction. The harder you look, the more there is to see.”

Comments

Wow! You’ve named the process I’ve been doing in my head for years. That’s a really cool feeling, knowing there’s a left-brain approach to my right-brain method.

Also, your motto is crystal clear and I’m totally printing it out and sticking it into my gaming binder. It’s a great thing for new players to hear when starting a sandbox game, especially if they’ve only played modules or in linear campaigns.

Please make sure you contribute only your own work, or work licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. Note: in order to facilitate peer review and fight vandalism, we will store your IP number for a number of days. See Privacy Policy for more information. See Info for text formatting rules. You can edit the comment page if you need to fix typos. You can subscribe to new comments by email without leaving a comment.